‘Soundvertising’ For Pizzas
The ad men of Indie Amsterdam came up with a pretty brilliant piece of guerrilla marketing for Domino’s Pizza, or ‘soundvertising’, as Amsterdam Ad Blog calls it. Instead of “Vrooooooooommmm”, the electric scooter of the pizza man says “Mmmmmmmmm… lekker” (“tasty”). Are electric vehicles paving the way for sound-based forms of advertising in the city?
Preview Of The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR)
Today we visited the press preview of the 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR). At several locations in the city various exhibitions, test sites, projects and interventions are connected by routes and not yet existing paths that only the IABR visitor will recognize. The next four months the exhibition program will be accompanied by all […]
Miniature Bug Memorials
Thanks to our clumsy human foot steps, millions of bugs, roaches, ants and mosquitos die a painful death on the sidewalk. Our cities are full of mass graves resulting from tragic insect massacres in public space. With their Bug Memorials project, the Minneapolis-based Carmichael Collective wants to raise awareness for this terrible side effect of mankind by installing little memorials at places where an insect has died.
The Temporary Royal Snooze: A Hotel With No Fixed Address
As we wrote recently, shipping containers are all the rage. They’ve been used to create a pretty diverse collection of buildings, including temporary housing for earthquake victims in Miyagi, an elementary school near Cape Town, a mobile office space prototype, a sports hall in South London, a grocery store in Seattle, and even a pirate radio tower in Melbourne. As architects and designers continue to explore the possibilities of repurposing structures, container urbanism is definitely a useful strategy going forward.
The Tokyo Zoo Project
GPS drawing is hot. On Spoon & Tamago (great blog for Japan enthusiasts) we came across the Tokyo Zoo Project, a website that builds upon this idea as it transforms Tokyo's map into one big zoo of GPS-drawn animals. The project, powered by Sony, presents a series of cycling routes around the Japanese capital that trace outlines of different animals, such as a panda that covers Shibuya and a big gorilla that crosses the city's Haneda district.
Woodworking: Transforming The Skyscraper
Building with timber is not exactly groundbreaking: wood is a material that is not only aesthetically pleasing (think log cabins in the Rocky Mountains), but one that is affordable, durable, and simple to maintain. Wood is a pretty ubiquitous material in much of the world, and it seems as though the time is right for […]
Coca-Cola’s Huggable Vending Machine
Recently, Coca-Cola installed an extraordinary vending machine at the National University of Singapore. The machine doesn’t want your money, it wants hugs. Ain’t that a good currency in times of financial crisis? A good hug is rewarded with a free can of Coke. It’s as simple as that.
BIG♥NYC
Earlier this year, the Times Square Alliance came up with a heart sculpture to celebrate Valentine’s Day. In cooperation with Copenhagen-based architecture firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) with FLATCUT and Local Projects the organization launched a beautiful interactive artwork that had to bring people together. The 9 square meters glowing sculpture consisted of 400 transparent LED lit acrylic tubes. The lighting […]
Seattle’s Surreal Blue Trees
Something surreal happened in Seattle’s Westlake Park last week, when all trees suddenly turned blue. Don’t worry, it’s not some tree disease but a fresh landscaping project by Egypt-born and Melbourne-based sculpture artist Konstantin Dimopoulos. To raise awareness about how important trees are to our survival, Dimopoulos painted the trees with a “biologically safe pigmented […]
Instaprint Prints Instagram Snaps Directly On The Spot
Instagram and many other mobile imaging applications have brought back the nostalgia of the aesthetics of retro photography to our smartphones over the last couple of years. However, as the digital image has become more immediate and networked, we could say that ‘print never went out of style’. New modes of printing — of what is usually refered to as ‘the Polaroid snapshot’ — could not have stayed out.
The Most Beautiful Starbucks In The World
Starbucks currently has 19,435 stores spread across 58 countries. According to their website, Starbucks is looking for ways to improve the environmental performances of their stores. The coffee shop brand doesn’t only follow LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certifications standards, some of its new outlets really look good, including this new shop near […]
Container Urbanism
The architects of Daiken-Met couldn’t find themselves a good office space in the city of Gifu, Japan. They decided to design and build the ideal studio themselves, which resulted in Sugoroku Office, a temporary moveable office that’s built from seven shipping containers. I’d say this three-level building is more than a piece of container architecture — it represents container […]
Wanna Lose Weight? Follow The Sign…
Three years ago, Volkswagen launched its internationally acclaimed Piano Stairs as part of the so-called Fun Theory. To encourage people to take the stairs instead of the escalator, steps of the stairs in a Stockholm metro station were transformed into sound-producing piano keys. As a result, stair use increased with 66%. Here we’ve got another way to […]
(Un)dynamic Urbanism: Frequent Transit Network Maps
TransLink, the public transportation authority for Greater Vancouver, recently released their Frequent Network Map. Jarrett Walker at Human Transit sees this as a big step for mobility in Canada’s West Coast city: “Meanwhile, this is a hugely important moment for Vancouver, especially because of the way the Frequent Network can organise future land use, and […]
Timon Sager’s Flying House
Once upon a time, images that represented the future needed to have flying cars in them. Timon Sager now has a different idea of the future, because he knows flying cars already exist. Similar to Pixar’s motion picture Up, where Carl Fredricksen turns his house into an airship using thousands of helium balloons, vehicle and […]
